Corner Closet Opens Up a Bit Wider

After C1 Financial’s chief executive, Trevor Burgess, rang the opening bell and posed outside the New York Stock Exchange with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers cheerleaders on Aug. 14 to celebrate his Florida-based company’s first day of trading, he received a message from Jason Grenfell-Gardner, the chief executive of the pharmaceutical company IGI Laboratories:

“And then there were two.”

So far as is known, Mr. Grenfell-Gardner and Mr. Burgess are the only publicly gay chief executives of publicly traded American corporations.

There have long been gay chief executives at American corporations, including some who lead relatively open lives. How many remains a subject of speculation. Among current chief executives of publicly traded corporations, Mr. Grenfell-Gardner and Mr. Burgess are the first who are willing to be publicly identified as gay. Both said they weren’t aware of any others.

While Mr. Grenfell-Gardner has never sought public attention for his groundbreaking status, neither has he shirked it. While being interviewed for the position of chief executive at IGI Laboratories in New Jersey, a board member asked what his wife would think about the demands of the job. “I don’t have a wife,” he said. “I have a husband. And he wouldn’t mind.”

Mr. Grenfell-Gardner said he didn’t detect any reaction from board members, and he got the job. In March 2013, he was publicly identified as gay when he and his husband, Yoann Ricau, were the subject of reports by journalists for NJ.com and the television and radio station WHYY in Philadelphia about how the Defense of Marriage Act affected Mr. Ricau’s immigration status as a French citizen married to an American.

Still, even then, the topic was considered so sensitive that the coverage didn’t name Mr. Grenfell-Gardner’s employer or say he was a chief executive.

“I never thought being gay was an issue,” Mr. Grenfell-Gardner said when I interviewed him for this column. “It shocks me that I’d be the first openly gay C.E.O. or that others would be reluctant to be identified as gay.”

Mr. Burgess, too, never expected that his sexuality would be an issue. “I’ve always believed that people should accept me for who I am, and I’m not going to apologize for that,” he said. “Being gay is just a fact. I view it like height, or eye color.”

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Jason Grenfell-Gardner, chief of IGI Laboratories, at its manufacturing plant in Buena, N.J.CreditJessica Kourkounis for The New York Times

In this regard, both men may represent a younger generation of gay and lesbian corporate executives who have never concealed their sexual orientation in the workplace or felt any need to do so. Mr. Grenfell-Gardner is 39 years old and Mr. Burgess 41. Older corporate executives often felt compelled to be far more cautious, and for good reason, given that homosexuality was long deemed a psychiatric disorder and in many places, homosexual acts were crimes.

But even older executives are showing an increasing willingness to be publicly identified as gay. Robert L. Hanson, 51, chief executive of John Hardy Limited, a luxury jewelry company owned by private equity investors, and former chief executive of the publicly traded American Eagle Outfitters, told me he had no objection to being identified as gay when I contacted him this week. Mr. Hanson thus becomes the first openly gay chief executive to have run a Fortune 1000 company (American Eagle ranks 681 on this year’s Fortune list.)

Mr. Hanson said that to perform at his best “requires that I bring my authentic self to work, every day.” That, he said, “is why I have always been out as a business leader and am willing to be publicly identified as gay.”

Earlier in his career, Mr. Burgess spent 10 years as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley, where he became a managing director and worked on numerous initial public offerings. He said he was openly gay, and the subject was never mentioned and posed no obstacles to advancement. But he was unusual. “I realized there were plenty of gay executives there, including a group of fairly senior people,” he said. “They just weren’t out. People would ask them if they were married, and they’d say, ‘I’m married to my job.’ Everyone knew they were gay but it was never acknowledged. The whole concept of the closet was a new phenomenon to me. I saw how it became all-encompassing and affected all aspects of their lives. That never appealed to me.”

Mr. Grenfell-Gardner agreed that the reluctance to be identified as gay “is probably a generational issue,” adding: “Much of my generation has been in a diverse and accepting environment for all or most of our lives. To even think of this as an issue seems like taking a step backward.” Mr. Grenfell-Gardner came out as gay while a student at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, where he said he felt comfortable and accepted.

That’s not to say that the two men haven’t experienced discrimination. When Mr. Burgess was a student at Dartmouth College in the early 1990s, one of his fraternity brothers wrote an article in the conservative Dartmouth Review that referred to Mr. Burgess with an anti-gay slur. “Within one week, I resigned from my fraternity and became president of the gay and lesbian student association,” Mr. Burgess recalled. When he was applying for jobs after graduation, he included the organization on his résumé. “They said they were looking for evidence of leadership,” he said. “Maybe I was naïve.” But it didn’t stand in the way of job offers.

Mr. Burgess noted that today, Dartmouth has Triangle House, one of five living and learning communities at the college. That house aims to enhance the “intellectual and cultural environment” for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students, according to Dartmouth. “Progress is possible,” Mr. Burgess said.

Both Mr. Burgess and Mr. Grenfell-Gardner are married, and both said having a supportive spouse had been important in their careers. Mr. Grenfell-Gardner, who grew up in Montana, joined an investment bank that focused on Eastern Europe after graduating from St. Andrews and moved to Estonia. He met Mr. Ricau in a class where both were learning to speak the language. “Who knew Estonian was the language of love?” Mr. Grenfell-Gardner asked.

They’ve been together since, through multiple moves and job changes. They had a commitment ceremony in 2003 while living in England, and Mr. Ricau joined Mr. Grenfell-Gardner after his employer at the time, another pharmaceutical company, transferred him to the United States in 2008. They married in New York in 2012.

Mr. Burgess met his husband, Gary Hess, 18 years ago, when he was 23 and lived in Boston. They married in Massachusetts in 2008. The two have a daughter, Logan, who is 5. “I’ve had the benefit of a comfort structure that has supported me in my work,” Mr. Burgess said.

Neither Mr. Burgess nor Mr. Grenfell-Gardner would probably be in the public eye now had Mr. Burgess not decided to approach Todd Sears, the founder of Out Leadership, on the eve of his company’s initial public offering. Mr. Burgess met Mr. Sears, who previously worked in wealth management at Merrill Lynch, some years ago at a conference in Chicago for gay and lesbian business school graduates.

Several of Mr. Burgess’s friends pointed out that once his bank went public, he’d be one of the first publicly gay chief executives. “I didn’t really think it was a story,” he said. “It just is what it is. But I did feel a sense of obligation to the generation behind me. We have good gay role models now in professional basketball and football, but there just weren’t many in business. I thought if I could be helpful to somebody, that would be great.”

Mr. Grenfell-Gardner expressed similar sentiments. “I hope the next generation realizes they can be whoever they want to be,” he said.

Mr. Sears said he encouraged Mr. Burgess to speak out. “It’s incredibly important for people to see that there are gay C.E.O.s,” Mr. Sears said. “So for Trevor and Jason to come out publicly as gay, that’s historic. At the same time, it’s mundane. They’re both C.E.O.s with partners and families and they’re just doing their jobs like everyone else. There’s nothing unique about that.”

Even now, Mr. Grenfell-Gardner said: “I don’t really want to be the poster child for gay C.E.O.s. There are so many talented people who have been mentors to me, both gay and straight. I want an environment where diversity is woven into our DNA as an organization. It makes us stronger. Forty percent of my leadership team is female. In the high-performance culture we’re trying to build, respect and tolerance is hard-wired. That’s what’s important to me.”

After an article about his bank holding company going public appeared in The New York Times, Edith Windsor, the plaintiff in the successful Supreme Court challenge to the Defense of Marriage Act, sent Mr. Burgess her congratulations. “That meant a lot to me,” he said. “She’s the real hero. I’m just a guy running a bank.”

Correction:

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this column attributed incorrectly a comment. It was Robert L. Hanson who said he was “willing to be publicly identified as gay,” not Trevor Burgess.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Corner Closet Opens Up a Bit Wider. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe